Brown's Body" all together in a big bullthroated chorus accompanied by the noisy "rattler mills" which churned without ceasing, and tumbled our castings about to rid them of tenacious sand and sharp corners and make them presentable. And if a joke sprang up anywhere it was everybody's joke, and went all round without interfering with the work. "Spindles," the 'prentice boy, was under a sort of kindly protectorate of them all, who saw that he worked like a horse, but never lifted beyond his strength. Then there was their stanch nerve-the kind that held Mike to his top-heavy ladle till the boys were out of danger; they all had that to a greater or less degree.

It might safely be said also, that although all moulders are not ignorant, nor any of them ignorant in all directions, yet they all, in common with other so-called uneducated workmen, show a sensitiveness about what they don't know. Have respect and interest in what a moulder does know, and he will eagerly tell you many of his trade secrets in exchange for a fact or so from you. But even hint by word or action that his knowledge is small, and it will go hard with you in the foundry. The consciousness that they vote blindly and the wrong way, that they know not how to seize opportunities nor just what to strike for, is pathetic; and I regret that, as a corollary to this, there exists a feeling almost of resentment and suspicion against the class who are better informed than they, whom they must deal

with as the Irishman played the fiddle, "by main strength and awkwardness."

Well, since my foundry days the condition of moulders has grown better. I have seen foundries lately with windows that let in light and good cheer, and proper ventilators that let out smoke, and gas-burners that dry moulds much better than wood fires, and save a man's eyes. I have seen shower rooms and free soap; and these last are great things, for when a man can leave his work and the dirt of it behind him together at the end of the day, he comes to much more consideration in the eyes of his fellow-citizens. Some day I hope for a sort of internal strike, whereby the real moulders will strike out the incapables, the mere "hoboes," from themselves and their unions, and stand ready to advance according to their own merits.

However, as I said, I never learned the trade-all of it-nor all about my gruff, hearty friends, the moulders. It is better to have been a moulder than to be one, even to-day; so, following the examples of the sons of great designers and inventors, who take their course in the foundry as a means to an end, I finally set out for new fields, with a broader chest and an invaluable, unforgetable accumulation of experience. But to-day, whenever I chance to pass within scent of a foundry and see the flames at the cupola stack, the old desire is strong upon me to get back to those primitive black elements again and be making things with my hands.

VOL. XXXVI.—45

ROM most of the fiction of the present day, always excepting that of Mr. Meredith and Mr. Hardy, I gain the impression that it is written for the young and by the young. I gain the impression that its authors have been checked at a certain point in their intellectual development by the abundance of the satisfaction their immature sympathies and observation provide. A few points of human nature and experience have claimed their attention without luring them to further inquiry. And the result is an atmosphere in which it is difficult for those who have "grown old and crafty and wise," and for those who have "grown old and godly and grave," to breathe. Yet to fiction surely we should turn as we grow older, to find that enlarged field of subtle and poignant interests demanded by our initiated minds. Nowhere else can we move in such varied and such stimulating society; nowhere else can we learn the jealously guarded secrets of the mind and heart that become important to us in proportion as our fellow beings render them inaccessible. In the novels of Henry James we drink deep of this peculiar satisfaction. Here, at least, there is no shirking of the exactions upon the mind made by increasing years. The enlightened and fortified intelligence has kept pace indefatigably with its task of investigation and record. There has been neither impatience nor weariness shown in the arduous study of character constantly rendered more complicated by wider and richer opportunities. Rightly to estimate the contribution thus made by Mr. James to the small body of what we may call our mature fiction demands an ability in analysis equal to his own; but there are in his work a few salient qualities that leap to the notice of the reader, and that, brought together, form in themselves a sufficiently coherent picture of the more obvious side of his performance. First of these is what can only be termed, although perhaps misleadingly, his patriotism. To this day we

hear it pointedly explained by the militant type of critic that he is the opposite of a patriot; so, possibly, it is necessary, in order to get the best point of view from which to regard his work, to examine somewhat closely his claims to Americanism. In one of his biographical sketches he declares that we know very little about a talent until we know where it grew up. Certainly in his own case it would be superficial in the extreme to fail to note in his accomplishment the influence of environment and of certain facts in his life.

He was born of American parents, his earlier childhood was passed in New York, where, he tells us, he spent a large part his time poring over the pictures in Punch, yielding himself to the appeal of their transAtlantic suggestions, and dreaming of Drury Lane and Kensington Gardens. When he was twelve years old he was taken abroad and his schooling was carried on in France and Switzerland. At sixteen he came back to continue his studies at Harvard. Finally when he was six and twenty he went to Europe to live the rest of his life there, chiefly in England. Once only he has returned for a visit of a few months' duration. As he is now well past the middle years it is immediately apparent how small a part America has played in creating his environment and forming his associations, and it is the more interesting to observe that his attitude toward Americans, after all has been said-and certainly it is not a little-shows extraordinary sympathy and comprehension. He has written between thirty and forty novels and long stories, and in twothirds of them, at least, is portrayed the American character with the scrupulous care of a mind ardent in the pursuit of truth. These wonderful types are as flexible and pure of outline, as nervously alive and as beautifully expressive, as any to be found in English fiction. They appear against the backgrounds of British and Continental life provided for them, surrounded by an air of their own, a clear medium of innocence enriched by intelligence. They

are acutely interested by the world that lies about them, and abundantly susceptible to new impressions; but what strikes one most forcibly in regarding them as a group is the depth of their temperamental refinement; their inability to think coarsely of their relations with their fellow beings. They represent their nation on its most exquisite side -youthful, bright, incorruptible, confiding, expectant. And almost with one accord they bring this unsophisticated, receptive temperament to the deep wells of civilization, where the intensity of their thirst becomes apparent. They are continually leaving the keen, thin atmosphere of their native society to expand and ripen in the mellow and brilliant world to which Mr. James invites them, and which returns them rejoiced, or sometimes chastened, but singularly unspotted and unimpaired. For, unlike many of the pilgrims in search of experience with whom literature has concerned itself, these people, created by Mr. James in the image of America, present an impenetrable surface to the demoralizing influences of the spectacle which they find so alluring. They receive the beauty of the vision and maintain their integrity of soul. They are as sound as the picked apples of their orchards, and they are made to assist at situations both ugly and mean without either losing their fine moral constancy or showing themselves priggishly insensitive. Gertrude Wentworth and Daisy Miller, Isabel Archer, Christopher Newman, Milly Theale, Francie Dosson, the incomparable Strether, all meet their various fates, some of them tragic enough, with the fervent sweetness of the dreamer for whom the joy of impressions can never be dimmed by the shock of personal disillusionment. Together they form a body of character and temperament that makes powerfully for wholesome idealism. Never was exhilaration of mind and soul obtained from purer sources than those from which they draw their inspiration, and never were the satisfactions of spiritual and intellectual curiosity more vividly realized.

Apparently Mr. James has not been able to forget the sentiment of the little boy turning the pages of Punch and looking forward with impatience to the time when he should walk the London streets. The sense of initiation began for him with those

London pictures, and the sense of personal discovery that was soon to follow has not yet ceased to exercise its magic. His latest novel, "The Ambassadors," contains the figure of a man who has grown grizzled in an Eastern town of the United States and who meets at last in Europe the savor of life that enchants him. In Strether we have the ideal American as Mr. James beholds him incarnate. A freshness of heart and soul that is not youth, but that to the crude eye simulates it; a temperament fine and rich and warm in which the seeds of experience, once dropped, spring instantaneously into blossom and fruit; a mild and genial kindliness, the key to precious intimacies, an appreciation of the more delicate delights of civilization so keen as to inflict suffering; the perfection of desire toward the right and of knowledge of what makes the right-these in Strether combine to form that Americanism for which Mr. James has the tenderest sentiment, the most loyal respect. In the first chapter of his "Life of Story" he declares that "the old relation, social, personal, æsthetic, of the American world to the European" is "as charming a subject as the student of manners, morals, personal adventures, the history of taste, the development of a society, need wish to take up with the one drawback, in truth, of being treatable but in too many lights;" and later he laments that "it has never been 'done,' to call done, from any point of view." Perhaps not; but it has never come nearer to it than at the hands of Mr. James himself, and the point of view to which he has chiefly confined himself is that which presents his compatriots in their most winning aspect. In his hands their representative fabric of qualities and susceptibilities becomes a thing of shimmering tones and elusive beauty. Milly Theale, for example, in "The Wings of a Dove," is minutely defined as a product of New York. Her wealth, her history, her face, her dress, have the stamp of New York upon them. She glides across the pages upon which are depicted her lovely life and death, with a fascinating lightness of movement, and the gracious turns of her beneficent spirit in working out its kindness of intention are not less entrancing. No character in any of the novels is freer from aggression, triviality, or crudity; no character is richer

in mellow instincts and harmonious impulses. In the disastrous impact of her fragile nature upon the coarser alien types with which she is brought into relations we have a tragedy of which Mr. James has developed many sides. It occurs in "The American," in "The Reverberator," in "An International Episode," in "Daisy Miller," and in each case it is the American whose texture, when the crash reveals it, proves to be exquisite in fineness, and quite without the stain of self-seeking.

Of course there are Americans of a different kind. There are Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond, Olive Chancellor and Mrs. Tristram, Roderick Hudson and Caspar Goodwood; there is the sturdy Waymarsh; but, interesting as these are, they are not the real thing. "The name of the good American," Mr. James has recently ejaculated in the person of the astute Miss Gostrey, "is as easily given as taken away. What is it, to begin with, to be one surely nothing that's so pressing was ever so little defined!" Mr. James defines it by the dramatic method, by embodying his definition in his chosen characters. For those who play the leading parts in his books he unerringly selects models of singular moral and temperamental beauty, and these respective and responsive people make up the principal charm of the international drama with which he so largely concerns himself. In detaching the figures of his Americans from the group of his distinguished characters there is no injustice to his art, for they indubitably stand for what is most individual and most precious in the sum of his achievement.

If Mr. James, however, after many years of what his critics deprecate as expatriation, has not merely preserved, but has intensified his sensitiveness to all that is sweet and sound in the American composition, it is not therefore the case that he finds in America the Land of his Heart's Desire. He has chiefly exploited it as a place from which to escape whole-hearted to the homes of traditions and symbols, of faint fragrant messages from the past, and long-established institutions. At the time when he knew it best he put into the mouth of a mad artist this characterization:

"We (the Americans) are the disin

herited of art. We are condemned to be superficial! We are excluded from the magic circle. The soil of American perception is a poor, little, barren, artificial deposit. Yes! we are wedded to imperfection. An American, to excel, has just ten times as much to learn as a European. We lack the deeper sense. We have neither taste nor tact nor force. How should we have them? Our crude and garish climate, our silent past, our deafening present, the constant pressure about us of unlovely circumstance, are as void of all that nourishes and prompts and inspires the artist as my sad heart is void of bitterness in saying so." Doubtless he would now put it with far less bald conclusiveness, even were the changes due to what he calls the annexation of the complicated European world less marked. His present impression, indeed, is conveyed chiefly by means of mild insinuation. The town of Woollett, Massachusetts, is, he suggests, a place marked "by the failure to enjoy"-one of the great failures in his eyes, and Woollett stands for a thousand towns of modern New England. It is not sure it ought to enjoy. If it were, it would. But it hasn't, poor thing, anyone to show it how. New York, despite its cleverness in originating Milly Theale, appears to little advantage in the references she makes to it; those "American references, with their bewildering immensities, their confounding moneyed New York, their excitements of high pressure, their opportunities of wild freedom, their record of used-up relatives." It is thrown out at the same time that Boston is a city in which one finds " a particular peace” beyond the power of New York to bestow, a city which may be counted upon to help you "feel your situation as grave" under the discipline, of life or death. Such attributions are amusing and discerning, and frankly unsympathetic. Mr. James is too deeply enamoured of art, the outcome of "Silence and slow Time," to be patient with any form of life that dissipates the æsthetic inclination or confuses the æsthetic effect. Not merely the pursuit of art as an avocation or religion or destiny, although in "The Tragic Muse" this too has received a large and splendid recognition, but the art that colors and moulds our surroundings, that affects our taste in the minutest particulars, that makes itself manifest through